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Knowledge Management

L I N K I N G P E O P L E T O K N O W L E D G E F O R B O T T O M L I N E R E S U L T S

C o r p o r a t e E x e c u t i v e

B r i e f i n g


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Linking People to Knowledge for Bottom Line Results 1

Introduction 2

The State of Enterprise Information 3Isolated Information Systems 3Infofamine or Infoglut? 3

Adding Value to Enterprise Information 4

Physical Mapping of Knowledge Resources 4Qualitative/Semantic Organization of Knowledge 4Best Practices for Organization of Knowledge 4

The Role of Technology in Knowledge Management 6

Knowledge Management Systems 7

Benefits of a Knowledge Management System 7

Key Features of a Knowledge Management System 7Technologies for Enabling Knowledge Management 9

Intranets 9Document Management Systems 9Information Retrieval Engines 9Groupware and Workflow Systems 10Push Technologies and Agents 10Help-Desk Applications 10Brainstorming Applications 10Data Warehouses and Data Mining Tools 10

Knowledge Management Platforms - A New Approach 11

The Knowledge Warehouse 11

Knowledge Contribution & Collection 11Knowledge Retrieval 12The Knowledge Directory 14Knowledge Categorization 14Knowledge Agents 14Distributed Systems 14Content Management 14

Conclusion 15

Appendix I - Knowledge Management Overview 16

Basics of Knowledge Management - Organizational Knowledge Transfer 16Knowledge Management Roles 17

About Dataware Technologies, Inc. 18Dataware Partial Client Listing 18

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S


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Executives in large organizations know that they must develop better techniques to manage knowledge, which is increasinglybecoming their greatest asset. Organizations currently create and maintain knowledge in isolated systems targeted at specificworkgroups. For users outside of the workgroup, that knowledge is virtually invisible. Their only options are to spend time

looking for it, recreate it, or do their job without it. Each of these options has a price: time, energy and bad decisions.Innovative organizations are examining how they can better manage their intellectual capital. This emerging field, calledknowledge management, addresses the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring and more efficiently using theinformation and expertise within an organization. Research firm Dataquest Inc. estimates by 1999 corporations will spend $4.5billion to better leverage their knowledge resources1. Global 2000 organizations are adopting knowledge management tech-niques at a quickening pace and have combined cultural and process changes with enabling technology to realize bottom lineresults. For example, the following companies have invested in knowledge management with impressive returns:

Dow Chemical increases annual licensing revenues by $100 million by managing its intellectual assets. 2

Silicon Graphics manages its product information communications processes and reduces sales training costs from$3 million to $200,000.3

Skandia Insurance reduced the startup time for opening a corporate office in Mexico from seven years to six months. 4

Steelcase realized an upswing in patent applications and a threefold increase in productivity after implementingknowledge sharing processes across multi-disciplinary customer teams.5

Texas Instruments avoided the cost of building a $500 million wafer fabrication plant by leveraging internal knowledgeand best practices.6

Chevron realizes $150 million annual savings in power and fuel expenses from knowledge sharing in energy-usemanagement.7

Booz-Allen & Hamilton saves over $7 million a year by reducing the time needed to find and access accurate employeeand collaborative information.8

With this type of return on investment, the market for knowledge management tools is growing and many vendors ofinformation-oriented products are introducing new knowledge management products or re-labeling their existing productsas knowledge management systems. Vendors of all manner of tools from intranet development tools to documentmanagement systems to search engines are calling their products knowledge management systems, without regard to whatthat means. Without new technologies designed to implement the revolutionary changes in the way knowledge workerscreate, communicate and manage knowledge, a knowledge management system has little chance of improving enterpriseknowledge sharing.

This white paper explores the concepts and technologies associated with implementing an effective knowledge managementsystem.

D a t a w a r e T e c h n o l o g i e s 1

Linking People to Knowledge for Bottom Line Resultsn1 Christine Ferrusi Ross, Knowledge Management Focus Report, (Dataquest, 1996). P. 312 Britton Manasco, Dow Chemical Capitalizes on Intellectual Assets, Knowledge, Inc., Vol. 2, No.3, (March 1997): 1-43 Britton Manasco, Silicon Graphics Develops Powerful Knowledge Network, Knowledge, Inc., Vol. 2, No. 1, (January 1997): 1-54 Ann Stuart, Five Uneasy Pieces, Part 2, CIO Magazine (June 1, 1996): 345 Ann Stuart, Five Uneasy Pieces, Part 2, CIO Magazine (June 1, 1996): 346 Carla ODell and C. Jackson Grayson, If we Only Knew what we know: Identification and Transfer of Internal Best Practices, (Houston, TX: American Productivity and quality Center, 1997). P. 87 Carla ODell and C. Jackson Grayson, If we Only Knew what we know: Identification and Transfer of Internal Best Practices, (Houston, TX: American Productivity and quality Center, 1997). P. 88 Ian Campbell, Director, Collaborative and Intranet Computing, The Intranet: Slashing the Cost of Business (International Data Corporation, 1996)


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2 D a t a w a r e T e c h n o l o g i e s

nIntroduction

Under increasing competitive pressure, many companies are examining how they can better manage their intellectual capital.As the pace of global competition quickens, executives realize that their edge lies in more efficiently transferring knowledgeacross the organization. The emerging field of knowledge management addresses the broad processes of locating, organizing,

transferring and more efficiently using information and expertise within an organization.New market forces and infrastructure changes have prompted an interest in knowledge management. Market forces includenew corporate models that emphasize corporate growth and efficiency, the need for cycle time reduction, knowledge lost fromdownsizing and the need to share information across the organization, which often means across the globe.

Recent infrastructure changes have significant positive impact on an organizations ability and desire to manage knowledge.The barriers to sharing information have been dramatically lowered by intranet technologies. Now companies comprehendthe extent to which knowledge can be shared across the organization; however, they also realize how many of their existingknowledge assets are accessible only to a small part of the organization.

To lower these barriers to sharing knowledge, leading executives recognize the need to institute new knowledge-centricpractices. Information technology plays an important role in enabling these processes across distributed enterprises. Whatexecutives want to avoid, however, is the cost and disruption of a wholesale change to the organizations information systems.

The promise of technologies aimed at knowledge management is that they will help organizations use the knowledge theyhave more efficiently without changing the tools they currently use to create it and process it. This is the promise, butunfortunately what many software vendors tout as knowledge management systems are only existing information retrievalengines, groupware systems or document management systems with a new marketing tagline. What executives really need arenew technologies designed to implement the revolutionary changes in the way knowledge workers create, communicate andmanage knowledge. To help answer that question, this white paper examines the practical aspects of knowledge managementand evaluates how various new and existing technologies can be used to create a knowledge management system that meetsthe needs of the organization.


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I S O L A T E D I N F O R M A T I O N S Y S T E M SToday organizations create and maintain knowledge in isolated systems or knowledge silos that provide adequate function-ality for specific workgroups or business processes, but are often invisible to or unreachable by others in the organization. For

example, a discussion database for a project group is immensely valuable to the members of that group who know where thedatabase is, whats in it and how to use it. But this information is often hidden or inaccessible to others who need it.Knowledge silos are all over the organization in the form of file servers, specialized text repositories (policy and proceduressystems, resume systems, etc.), intranet servers and document management systems.

I N F O F A M I N E O R I N F O G L U T ?While corporate knowledge silos and the barriers they often erect contribute to a perceived lack of information, often referredto as infofamine, most knowledge workers increasingly have access to too much information, often called infoglut. The Internethas led to a deluge of information, but most of it is not useful for any given task. Most people have used Internet searchengines to look up information on a specific topic, only to have it return thousands or tens of thousands of hits, most of themirrelevant.

Another contributor to infoglut is the overuse of email. While email is undeniably a useful communications medium, it alsoprovides the means to drown people with just-in-case information. Most people only need information on a just-in-timebasisthe right information at the time that they need it.

The State of Enterprise Informationn



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nAddingValue to Enterprise InformationValue is added to an information system when the information in it is classified using an intuitive or easily learned taxonomy.A taxonomy, or knowledge map, allows other users to access the relevant object or idea more quickly and provides a contextfor finding related objects or ideas.

There are numerous methods for organizing knowledge assets. Familiar systems include the Dewey Decimal System, theU.S. Library of Congress cataloging methods and the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for books. These systemswere designed for cataloging general knowledge, yet are not very intuitive when used for organizing knowledge assets in acorporate environment.

P H Y S I C A L M A P P I N G O F K N O W L E D G E R E S O U R C E SThe most common way to map information in a corporate environment is to display the physical systems where theinformation resides. This goes beyond a file/directory metaphor to a higher level that shows databases, file servers, documentmanagement systems, groupware systems and other knowledge silos, in addition to the individual files contained in thosesystems. This classification scheme helps workers find information quickly because it shows them exactly where the informationthey need resides. However, it is of little use to those who are unfamiliar with or uninterested in learning the information

technology (IT) architecture of the organization.

Q U A L I T A T I V E / S E M A N T I C O R G A N I Z A T I O N O F K N O W L E D G EFor those who are unfamiliar with or do not want to learn an organizations IT architecture, a qualitative organization ofknowledge assets is more useful than file directory organization. Qualitative organization helps workers quickly find theinformation they are looking for by allowing them to search for it by its topic instead of its location. The qualitative methodsappropriate for organizing corporate knowledge assets can be classified as process oriented, functional, or conceptual. TheProcess Classification Framework9 is a good example of a process-oriented or supply chain model. Process classification usesa generalized model of how a business functions from understanding customers and markets to managing people,processes and resourcesand maps it to the knowledge contained in the organization.

Functional models, which are loosely based on an organizational chart, are common but tend to work better as a corporate

archive or information morgue. They are usually not effective for sharing information across functions, since most workersdo not have the time to browse through the knowledge assets of other departments in the hope that they stumble uponsomething useful.

Conceptual models are often the most useful method of classification, but harder to construct and maintain. Conceptual modelsorganize information around topics, such as proposals, customers or employees. These topical areas contain information origi-nally produced by different departments and across functions which helps in transferring knowledge across the organization.

B E S T P R A C T I C E S F O R O R G A N I Z A T I O N O F K N O W L E D G EIn practice, the best system for helping end-users quickly find what they are looking for depends on individual preferences,the information required and the clues with which they begin the search. For example, a user may know he or she is lookingfor information from a news feed and that its stored in a news feed server. In this case, the classification system that helpsthe user find the desired information is physical, showing the location of the news feed system in relation to other physicalinformation systems.

9 International Benchmarking Clearinghouse, Process Classification Framework, (Houston, TX: American Productivity and Quality Center, International Benchmarking Clearinghouse, 1995).


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AddingValue to Enterprise Informationn


However, if that person is looking for information about a particular customer, a physical classification system offers littlevalue, because knowledge about that customer is likely spread across many physical information systems. In this case, the bestclassification system is a conceptual knowledge map that includes a customer category.

To truly add value to information spread across the enterprise, organizations must provide multiple ways to categorize it. Thisallows end users to slice through the information using the method best suited to their specific problem.

Figure 1 - A Hierarchy containing conceptual, functional and physical models for knowledge classification


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Two distinct factions exist in the knowledge management world. Those who maintain that organizational behavior andindividual socialization determine how much knowledge passes between individuals generally believe that technology isnot the answer. Rather, they see technology as merely a distraction from issues such as change management, culture and

leadership. Information technology evangelists who focus on technology as the solution to the knowledge managementquestion occupy the other end of the spectrum.

Most case studies to date, however, have shown that a successful knowledge management program requires a change inorganizational behavior and in technology infrastructure. Technology is not the solution to an organizations knowledgemanagement needs, however it is required to enable the organizations knowledge management processes.


nThe Role of Technology in Knowledge ManagementFigure 2 - Successful knowledge management programs require both hard and soft skills

Successful KM Requires Both

Technology & Measurement

Leadership & Culture


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Knowledge Management Systemsn


An organizations knowledge management system is the collection of information technologies used to facilitate the collection,organization, transfer and distribution of knowledge between employees. This section addresses some of the characteristics ofthese systems, while the following section analyzes some of the specific technologies available for constructing a knowledge

management system.

B E N E F I T S O F A K N O W L E D G E M A N A G E M E N T S Y S T E MCreating an enterprise-wide knowledge management system is not a simple task. However, the benefits of a well-designedsystem are immense:AwarenessEveryone knows where to go to find the organizations knowledge, saving people time and effort.AccessibilityAll individuals can use the organizations combined knowledge and experience in the context of theirown roles.

AvailabilityKnowledge is usable wherever it is needed whether from the home office, on the road or at the customersside. This enables increased responsiveness to customers, partners and coworkers.

TimelinessKnowledge is available whenever it is needed, eliminating time-wasting distribution of information justin case people are interested.

K E Y F E A T U R E S O F A K N O W L E D G E M A N A G E M E N T S Y S T E MAlthough individual knowledge management systems are as different as each individual organization, they share manybasic features.Open and Distributed

By definition, a knowledge management system unifies existing knowledge silos. Standard protocols and applicationprogramming interfaces (APIs) enable integration among systems such as groupware, e-mail, document management anddirectory services. In implementing a unifying system, organizations must ensure that the information architecture is flexibleenough to meet the evolving needs of individual organizations. Knowledge management systems must also be able to be

distributed over various host computers and physical locations. The system should allow system administration from anylocation by using HTML, Java applets or ActiveX controls that are accessible through any compatible web browser.

Customizable

All organizationsand large organizations in particularrequire an extremely customizable knowledge managementsystem. The system should supply user interfaces in the form of templates so users can easily customize them using tools suchas HTML and JavaScript.

A robust knowledge management system should allow easy integration of existing and new applications. It must includedocumented application programming interfaces (APIs) and software developer toolkits (SDKs) that allow the organizationto link systems to each other. For example, if the system administrator links a monitoring system to a technical documentationrepository, he or she can push the appropriate technical documentation directly to a repair technician when the monitoringsystem senses that a system is malfunctioning.

MeasurableMeasurement is a critical aspect of any knowledge management effort to strike the right balance between organizational andtechnological changes. Only by quantifying and processing the results can organizations determine if the systems are havingthe desired effect. A knowledge management system includes tools that allow managers to measure and verify usage to get aclear picture of how the system is being used, locate performance bottlenecks and, most importantly, use the data to improveorganizational knowledge transfer processes.


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nKnowledge Management SystemsSecure

While traditional applications usually require the administrator to grant access to those who need particular information,knowledge management applications focus on maximizing access to knowledge. Therefore they are more likely to require the

administrator to prohibit access to specific content areas to those workers who should not have access to them. However, thisdoes not mean that knowledge management systems do not have security. A knowledge management system needs to providesecure repositories and preserve security models present in existing knowledge silos where appropriate, while allowing accessacross the organization to those who need it.

Creating and managing the enterprise security architecture is a complex problem. However, new standards such as LDAP(Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) aim to unify disparate systems and simplify their management. Using LDAP allows theknowledge management system to access user rights and information, without requiring the administrator to recreate andmaintain user directories within the knowledge management system as well as each of the existing knowledge silos.



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Technologies for Enabling Knowledge Managementn


Vendors of information-oriented products are rushing to introduce new knowledge management products and re-label theirexisting products as knowledge management products in an effort to quickly gain mindshare and marketshare in a potentiallyenormous market. But computer applications have addressed aspects of knowledge management for years.

No single technology fills all the criteria required of a knowledge management system, because knowledge management isnot solely about technology. It is a multi-disciplinary field that draws on aspects of information science, interpersonalcommunications, organizational learning, cognitive science, motivation, training, publishing and business process analysis. Thefollowing sections look at the roles specific technologies play in an enterprise-wide knowledge management environment.

I N T R A N E T S Intranets have sprung up across corporations at a rate that challenges any previous introduction of new technology. They areideal environments for sharing information that is both dynamic and richly linked. However, most large organizations quicklyreach a point where so much information exists on the intranet that it begins to suffer the same problems that exist on theWorld Wide Web; no one knows where everything is, so no one can quickly find what he or she is looking for.

Although some evangelists profess that all of an organizations knowledge should be transferred to the intranet, many others

take a modified view of what it is best suited to do. The intranet can be broken down into two distinct areas: the technologyinfrastructure (IP networks, universal web browser, thin client and the HTML format), and the web server as a contentrepository. These recent changesthe web browser and the web server being the most visiblehave enabled greater accessto information for broader groups of knowledge workers and increased the speed of integration for application developers.

Allowing users to access all corporate knowledge through a web browser is not equivalent to forcing all knowledge assets ontothe web server. Applications, specialized repositories and various other knowledge silos will always exist because they havecapabilities that are distinct from those of a generalized knowledge management system. Web sites are best used for hostingand managing content that is constantly changing and linked in a complex manner. But to the organization as a whole, eachintranet site is just another type of knowledge silo, the content of which must be integrated in the organizations knowledgemanagement system along with the other silos that exist across the enterprise.

D O C U M E N T

M A N A G E M E N T

S Y S T E M SDocument management systems are repositories of important corporate documents and are therefore important stores ofexplicit knowledge. They are also valuable tools for creating and processing complex documents, such as new drug applicationsin pharmaceutical companies. Document management systems excel at controlling the process of document creation, processingand review.

Some companies are approaching enterprise knowledge management based on document management. However, many havefound that the bulk of knowledge workers resist using highly structured document management processes for all of theirdocument creation and management tasks. Most users do not participate directly in complex document creation and thereforedo not realize enough value from those systems to make an investment in learning how to use them. Therefore, documentmanagement systems are important knowledge silos that must be integrated into the corporate knowledge infrastructure, butare not used by most organizations as the basis for a complete knowledge management system.

I N F O R M A T I O N R E T R I E V A L E N G I N E SInformation retrieval technology, whether it be in the form of corporate text repositories or intranet search facilities, exists inmany organizations as a knowledge silo containing legacy information. Information retrieval vendors continue to be concernedwith satisfying the needs of information seekers and have added features such as relevancy ranking, natural language query-ing, summarization and others that have increased the speed and precision of finding information.


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nTechnologies for Enabling Knowledge ManagementG R O U P W A R E A N D W O R K F L O W S Y S T E M SOrganizations use groupware systems when users in workgroups or departments need to communicate and collaborate.Groupware allows formal and ad hoc conversations in cases when the participants can not communicate in real time. This

makes groupware an important technology for enhancing the exchange of tacit information. However, like other applications,groupware databases become knowledge silos that must be integrated into the enterprise knowledge architecture.

Knowledge transfer processes often occur on an ad hoc basis when the need for specific knowledge arises somewhere inthe organization, but organizations also have a large number of formalized processes that regulate the flow of information.Workflow systems enable users to codify knowledge transfer processes when they require a more rigid method of dissemina-tion. For example, proposal generation processes often require the proposal writer to collect prior knowledge assets, createnew information and gain approval on the entire proposal. This process necessitates structured and ordered informationpreparation and review, which is what a workflow system facilitates.

P U S H T E C H N O L O G I E S A N D A G E N T STechnologies that automate the transfer of information to end users have received considerable attention recently. Although

e-mail served this purpose for over a decade, new web-based technologies have added better presentation, real-time updatesand the ability to push applications as well as content. Content push is a dynamic form of electronic publishing and is thereforean important feature of a knowledge management system.

Agents are a specialized form of push technology. Agents are controlled by the end user, who can specify the type of knowledgehe or she wants to receive. Agent capabilities are extremely valuable in knowledge-intensive environments, where knowledgeworkers do not have the time to continually monitor discreet information resources. Knowledge management systems shouldprovide the means for users to easily capture the particular kinds of knowledge assets they need to monitor without requiringthem to learn a complex search syntax.

H E L P - D E S K A P P L I C A T I O N SMany organizations use help-desk technology to respond to both internal and external requests for information. However,

the knowledge accumulated in help-desk systems can have much broader applications than answering specific questions. Forexample, service request logs are valuable tools to assist in product design and improving services. To tap this potentiallyvaluable information, companies will want to integrate their help-desk applications into the knowledge management system.

B R A I N S T O R M I N G A P P L I C A T I O N SBrainstorming tools help inspire creative thinking and convert tacit into explicit knowledge. These end user applications helpcategorize, organize and identify knowledge resources and are therefore useful knowledge creation tools. While it should nottry to replicate their functionality, an organizations knowledge management system must provide an easy way for users orthese applications to identify, capture and share the results of these activities with others across the enterprise.

D A T A W A R E H O U S E S A N D D A T A M I N I N G T O O L SOrganizations are creating data warehouses and arming their business managers with data mining tools to optimizeexisting relationships and discover new ones between customers, suppliers and internal processes. Used primarily by businessmanagers, leading organizations are now broadening their use since everyone in a knowledge-based organization needs tomake decisions based on increasingly complex sets of data. Knowledge management systems must provide meaningful accessto data warehouses by supporting standard protocols such as Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Structured QueryLanguage (SQL). Knowledge management systems also need to provide a way to describe and provide access to commonreports so that users not intimately familiar with data mining tools and techniques can find and access current reports onsubject areas they are investigating.

1 0 D a t a w a r e T e c h n o l o g i e s


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Knowledge Management Platforms -A NewApproachnT H E K N O W L E D G E W A R E H O U S EFirst RDBMSs, then document management/groupware systems and now web servers. All of these systems have aimed toreplace the organizations knowledge silos with a single application. However, stand-alone applications are too feature rich

to make this practical or even desirable. The goal of a knowledge warehousethe core component of the knowledgemanagement systemis to preserve the creation and processing functionality inherent in knowledge silos, while offering allusers access to the knowledge contained in the silos. In addition, a knowledge warehouse allows users to submit valuableknowledge even when they are not frequent contributors and therefore do not work through an established knowledge silo.This eliminates the need for all end users in the organization to install and maintain complex client software for all of theapplication silos.

Web Browser

Knowledge Warehouse

Contribute Access

WordProcessor

WebServer

DBMS Doc MgmtSystem

Figure 3- A knowledge warehouse unifies access to organizational knowledge silos without replacing them.

K N O W L E D G E C O N T R I B U T I O N & C O L L E C T I O NEnd users should be able to easily add content to a knowledge warehouse through their web browsers. The knowledgewarehouse must support all of the various desktop document formats as well as graphics, video clips, sound clips and others.

Some knowledge assets benefit from a more structured approach than that provided by a simple document. For example, if allan organizations knowledge workers were asked to contribute skill profiles as word processor documents, they will probablyproduce thousands of variations in format. However, if they fill out a web-based form instead, they will submit this informationin a consistently organized way. Administrators should be able to easily create such forms to allow users to enter such struc-tured knowledge. This not only allows the user to perform fielded searches on the class of knowledge assets, but also enforcesa uniform presentation of the resulting information.

To enable or increase the accuracy and speed of information retrieval, knowledge assets need to be associated with categoriesfrom the corporate taxonomy or knowledge map. This categorization can be accomplished by the end user on submission or bya content manager. The knowledge warehouse must incorporate categorization into the submission process, yet be flexibleenough to adapt to each organizations processes.

File Server DMS DB Server Notes Server Web Site

Groupware


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nKnowledge Management Platforms -A NewApproachK N O W L E D G E R E T R I E V A LThe other half of a knowledge management system concerns itself with access to the organizations knowledge assetsregardless of whether they were contributed to the knowledge warehouse by end users, or to a knowledge silo linked to the

knowledge warehouse by the administrator. This section discusses some of the knowledge retrieval features that make iteasier for end users to find the specific knowledge assets they require.

Search

Knowledge workers now demand searching tools that are sophisticated yet easy to use. Some of the more useful advancedsearching features for a knowledge warehouse include:

Natural language searching

Boolean searching

Automatic root expansion

Proximity searching

Numeric searching

Term weighted searching

Thesaurus integration

Search by object type (e.g., PowerPoint files, internal documents, etc.)

Search by metadata fields (e.g., knowledge map (taxonomy) categories, author, date, location, etc.)

Concept searching (e.g., find more like this)

Knowledge Mining

Internet information seekers are familiar with entering a seemingly precise query, only to be presented with thousands or tensof thousands of hits, with no easy way to navigate them. To solve this exasperating problem, search results should be clusteredor categorized using the knowledge map categories. This enables the user to quickly drill down to or mine the most relevantknowledge assets without having to learn complex query languages. No one search method is best for all people at all times.Whether users prefer to browse or search the knowledge warehouse, knowledge assets should also be clustered by othermethods including physical system source, content type, author or other metadata fields.


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D a t a w a r e T e c h n o l o g i e s 1 3

Knowledge Management Platforms -A NewApproachnFigure 4 - Knowledge mining provides end users with a way to quickly narrow down a set of knowledge assets.

A knowledge warehouse must be flexible when delivering knowledge assets, since users use the system in different ways, manyof which can not be anticipated. Users should be able to view content in a browser, in the original application if present, asHTML, saved to disk or e-mailed.

Benefits of a Knowledge Warehouse Approach

Low overall costcentrally deployed and managed from the server, standard browser for access

Leverage existing infrastructure investmentsin desktop computers, servers, mainframes, databases, applicationsand networks

Scales from the LAN to the enterprise and beyondto connect workers in the department and across the enterprise


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nKnowlede Management Platforms -A NewApproachT H E K N O W L E D G E D I R E C T O R YFinding who knows what in an organization has always been a time-intensive process. A knowledge management systemallows users to quickly access peoples skills and areas of expertise through an integrated knowledge directory. The knowledge

directory should allow queries by taxonomy area (for example, who are the experts on marketing?) and return a list of expertsranked by experience. In addition, a knowledge directory should be able to be queried directly or accessed from a documentview or result list. A key aspect of the knowledge directory is the ability to include administrator-defined rules (for example,always make Bob Smith the top expert in network management). This ensures that particular experts can always beidentified (or hidden).

K N O W L E D G E C A T E G O R I Z A T I O NMany techniques exist for categorizing knowledge, ranging from manual, human-centric approaches to completely automatedprocesses based on artificial intelligence methods. While fully manual processes are time and labor intensive, fully automatedapproaches do not yield accurate enough results. However, a categorization server that automates a first-level classification ofknowledge assets by using knowledge map categories saves a good portion of the labor required to fully classify information.

The organization can then incorporate the final classification as part of an editorial or content management process.

K N O W L E D G E A G E N T SAfter finding a collection of relevant knowledge assets, users need to know when similar assets appear, regardless of theindividual knowledge silo in which they reside. Users should be able to set up agents for monitoring the knowledge warehousebased on full text searches, knowledge map categories, author names and other metadata fields. They should be able to set upprofiles for filtering news feeds and other dynamic sources. Notification frequency (by time and/or quantity) and method(by e-mail or personal web page) are important parameters that should be selectable by the end user.

Administrators and content editors need to be able to direct specific information to a defined group of users through pushmechanisms such as Netscape Netcaster, Microsofts Channel Definition Format and others.

D I S T R I B U T E D

S Y S T E M SBandwidth limitations and other concerns will move large organizations to install more than one knowledge warehouse acrossthe enterprise. To keep an integrated approach to finding knowledge, organizations require a query broker that distributessearches across one or more knowledge warehouse and then returns an integrated set of results. Knowledge assets are notmerely contained within the knowledge warehouse or within the corporation itself, but also exist on the Internet. A querybroker should also provide integrated searching of other repositories, including popular Internet search services.

C O N T E N T M A N A G E M E N TA knowledge management system that leaves content management up to end users quickly succumbs to informationpollution. Successful knowledge management implementations appoint knowledge managers or content editors whose job isto evangelize knowledge management processes and to validate and edit content in their area of expertise. Without a content

manager to ensure that information is categorized appropriately and that the content is useful and understandable, usersquickly begin to have difficulty finding what they are looking for. The system soon overflows with knowledge assets ofquestionable value. A knowledge warehouse should be flexible enough to meet the organizations content policies and tooperate either with or without editorial approval, or with a combination of end user and content manager supervision. Inaddition, the administrator should be able to tie the editorial process to particular areas of the taxonomy or particular typesof documents.



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Conclusionn

Chief Information Officers, Chief Knowledge Officers, and other knowledge professionals are finding that vendors of intranetdevelopment environments, document management systems, information retrieval engines, relational and object databases,electronic publishing systems, groupware, workflow, push technologies, agents and other technologies are now presenting

their products as knowledge management systems. These technologies are well suited to creating, processing and managingparticular knowledge assets; however, they rarely meet the need of unifying all of an organizations knowledge.

Accomplishing this task requires an enterprise knowledge management system. An enterprise knowledge management systemis defined as the group of information technologies used to facilitate the collection, organization, transfer and distribution ofknowledge among employees. A knowledge management system must be open, distributed, customizable, measurable andsecure to effectively meet the organizations needs. The core component of a knowledge management system, the knowledgewarehouse, should preserve the creation and processing functionality inherent in various knowledge silos, while offering allusers access to the knowledge contained there. The knowledge warehouse should also enable web browser submission ofvaluable knowledge assets to those who do not contribute to the organization through an established silo, or have otherexplicit knowledge to contribute for which no appropriate silo exists.

However, organizational knowledge goes beyond mere documents, URLs and other explicit forms. Finding who knows what

in an organization has always been a time-intensive process. A knowledge management solution must include a knowledgedirectory of peoples' skills and areas of expertise, so employees can quickly find the experts they are looking for.

As global competitive pressures continue to increase, organizations that effectively manage their knowledge assets andcontinuously improve their knowledge transfer processes will gain substantial competitive advantage. Knowledge managementpractices, enabled by effective technologies, can add to both the top and bottom lines through reduced cycle times, greaterefficiency and greater use of superior solutions across the enterprise.


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nAppendix I - Knowledge Management OverviewKnowledge management is a field of study that is both old and new. While various parts of the organization have studiedaspects of capturing, transferring and sharing knowledge in the past, practitioners of knowledge management tend to takea more holistic, enterprise-wide approach. Knowledge management is a multi-disciplinary field that draws on aspects of

information science, information technology, interpersonal communications, organizational learning, cognitive science,motivation, training, publishing and business process analysis.

B A S I C S O F K N O W L E D G E M A N A G E M E N T O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L K N O W L E D G E T R A N S F E RTo begin to manage corporate knowledge, knowledge managers need to first understand how it is transferred within theorganization. Individuals are the source of organizational knowledge. For the knowledge to gain value, the organization mustprovide mechanisms that capture it and transfer it across the organization.Types of Knowledge

Individuals are the source of two types of knowledge: tacit and explicit. Information technology has traditionally focused onexplicit knowledge, or knowledge that you can codify and transmit in a package, such as a spreadsheet. Tacit knowledge ispersonal, context-specific and is difficult to transmit. Types of tacit knowledge include hands-on skills, special know-how,

intuitions and the like. As Michael Polanyi, the first to distinguish tacit from explicit knowledge, stated We can know morethan we can tell.10 Knowing how to effectively perform a job means understanding both types of knowledge.

Knowledge Conversion

The organization gains only limited benefit from knowledge isolated within an individual; to realize the full value of aknowledge asset it must be transferred from one individual to another. Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi describe fourdifferent modes of knowledge conversion in The Knowledge Creating Company.11 Although the four processes have beenwidely referred to, their names have varied in different representations of Nonaka and Takeuchis work. They will be referredto here as: socialization, capture, dissemination and internalization.

Socialization is the process of sharing experiences and is often done through observation, imitation and practice. It occurs inapprenticeships and at conferences, as well as at the water cooler. Capture is concerned with articulating tacit knowledge andturning it into an explicit form, for example, writing a report on what you learned at a workshop. When you copy and distrib-

ute the report, you convert knowledge from one explicit form to another, and dissemination takes place. Internalization is theprocess of experiencing knowledge through an explicit source. For example, you read a report about the workshop, mentallyput yourself in the situation and combine that experience with previous experiences.

A thorough understanding of these knowledge transfer processes is essential for discerning an organizations strengths andweaknesses. Organizations that have successfully implemented knowledge management principles have used this as a guideto help them design new processes for increasing knowledge capture and sharing.

10 Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).11 Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).



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Appendix I - Knowledge Management OverviewnK N O W L E D G E M A N A G E M E N T R O L E SKnowledge management has brought with it new corporate roles and titles. The most visible of these is the Chief KnowledgeOfficer, or CKO. As Tom Davenport, professor and director of the Information Management Program at the University of Texas

at Austin, describes it, CKOs have two critical responsibilities: creating a knowledge management infrastructure and buildinga knowledge culture.12

Most organizations that have successfully implemented knowledge management have created a corporate level knowledgemanagement team led by a high level executive (often the CKO, CIO or a line-of-business head). These teams usually consistof a small group (under a dozen) of employees dedicated to coordinating and evangelizing knowledge managementprinciples. In many cases they are responsible for designing, piloting and implementing a knowledge management system.

This small knowledge management group cannot effect enterprise-wide changes by itself. Content managers or knowledgeeditors are needed to manage the capture and classification of knowledge to guard against information pollution. They aretypically spread throughout an organization and spend some part of their job framing and structuring knowledge. TomDavenport has remarked that:

In the rosy future I envision, categorization and organization of knowledge will be a core competence for every firm.

This will require strategic thinking about what knowledge is important; development of a knowledge vocabulary (anda thesaurus to accommodate near misses); prolific creation of indices, search tools and navigation aids; and constantrefinement and pruning of knowledge categories. Knowledge editors will have to combine sources and add context totransform information into knowledge.13

12 Tom Davenport, Knowledge Roles: The CKO and Beyond, CIO Magazine(April 1, 1996)13 Tom Davenport, The Future of Knowledge Management, CIO Magazine(December 15/January 1, 1996)

Tacit

Explicit

From

ToTacit Explicit

Socialization: Water cooler,Conferences

Internalization: Form opinion of a report

Capture: Write a report

Dissemination: Email a report

Figure 5 - Knowledge transfer processes


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Corporate Information Commerical Professional/Educational Government InformationAccess and Electronic Electronic Information Access and Access and Electronic

Publishing Publishing Electronic Publishing Publishing

Dataware Technologies, Inc., is the leading provider of software for enterprise information access and professional electronicpublishing. Datawares innovative software products integrate information from a wide variety of sources and allow for accessand publishing via intranets and the Internet, enterprise networks, CD-ROM, commercial online services, print-on-demand and

combinations of these media. The Dataware II Knowledge Management Suite enables users to contribute, manage and shareknowledge across and beyond the enterprise.

D A T A W A R E P A R T I A L C L I E N T L I S T I N GToday, Dataware software is used by more than 2,000 organizations worldwide - including Global 2000 corporations,commercial publishers, government agencies, professional firms and educational institutions - serving over 1,000,000end-users in more than 20 countries.nAbout Dataware Technologies, Inc.


AT&T Baker & Taylor British Library British Post Office

3Com Corporation Derwent Information Georgia Tech European Patent Office

3M Dun & Bradstreet Helsinki School of Economics Inland Revenue Service

Boeing Company Gale Research Johns Hopkins University National Archives

Chase Manhattan Bank Information Handling Services Legal Support Services Netherlands Finance Ministry

DuPont Merck McGraw-Hill Library Corporation Social Security Administration

Eastman Kodak National Geographic Society Los Alamos National Lab Statistics Canada

Exxon Newsbank Los Angeles Times U.S. Air Force

LEGO R.R. Donnelley & Sons Skadden, Arps U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Mobil Singapore Press Holdings University of Barcelona U.S. Department of Commerce

Shell Research Standard & Poors University of Illinois U.S. Department of Justice

Siemens Thomas Publishing University of Nevada U.S. House of Representatives

Rohm & Haas Thomson & Thomson University of Washington U.S. Navy

Toyota Ziff-Davis Publishing White & Case U.S. Patent Office


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